Great Film overall

Your blood may run cold, but you now find yourself pinioned to the story.

There's a more than satisfactory amount of boom-boom in the movie's trim running time.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

I live in Londonderry, New Hampshire, walking distance to where this entire Pamela Smart saga occurred. I also collect documentaries and have been a student of the genre for many years. In both areas of knowledge, this "documentary" is breathtakingly bad: it is a distortion of the evidentiary facts of the Smart case and it is an amateurish production concocted by a director hell-bent on convincing the gullible that Pamela Smart is innocent.Was the Smart case a big media story here in little New Hampshire? Of course it was. But is this the reason Pamela Smart was found guilty? Hell, no. Pamela Smart convicted Pamela Smart: her entire "defense" was that she didn't sexually manipulate the child student of hers, Flynn, into killing her husband, and that she didn't even know about it until afterwards. 25 years later, this director is trying to get us to buy the same story.Unfortunately for him, reasonable people who listen to the secret tape recordings of Smart made prior to her arrest, come to the same conclusion the reasonable people of her jury came to: this "defense" is a ridiculous lie. But why let facts get in the way of a good story, right? Except that this HBO piece is not a good story, it's an example of the worst of propaganda films: twist and contort the facts, aggrandize speculation and minor details, hide or discount the facts that don't fit in with your agenda. This director's agenda is to elevate Pamela Smart to the status of a wrongly-convicted heroine. This is absurd to those who actually know the case. Gregg Smart was an innocent 24-year-old who has spent the last 25 years in the cold ground of East Derry Cemetery, put there by pedophile Pamela Smart and the boys she so clearly manipulated to kill him (for the life insurance money she would get). Giving this cretin any voice to spew her long-ago-disproved lies is bordering on evil, in my opinion.Instead of wasting your time with this ridiculous propaganda film, read the transcripts of the tape recordings Smart's attorneys desperately tried to prevent the jury from hearing (available online). You will be stunned, her guilt is so obvious. Media coverage had nothing to do with Smart's conviction: every juror said the same thing: it was the tapes.As Smart herself puts it in one of the tapes, as she's trying to prevent her intern from cooperating with police, "If you tell the truth you're gonna have to send Bill, you're gonna have to send Pete, you're gonna have to send J.R. and you're gonna have to send me to the (expletive) slammer for the rest of our entire life,". You have to be a special kind of stupid to believe the new "truth" that she had nothing to do with it and is an innocent heroine convicted because of media coverage. It is simply absurd. This "director" is just an amateur who made one previous short film about his own father, nothing more; he is desperate to find material, apparently. Don't be sucked in by his distortions and spin: read the transcripts instead.I'll leave you with some other parts of the police transcripts of Smart's statements to Cecilia Pierce and you decide if there's a snowball's chance in hell of her being innocent: "I'm afraid one day you're gonna come in here and you're gonna be wired by the (expletive) police and I'm gonna be busted," (Busted? But I thought you were innocent, Pam.) On the subject of Ralph Welch, another high school kid, who one of her accomplices told about the murder: "Nothing was going wrong until (expletive) they told Ralph. . . . It's their (expletive)faults . . . that they told Ralph, you know," Later, when her arrest seemed imminent: "I don't know what the hell's going'on ... All I know is that, uh, pretty soon J.R. is probably gonna roll." (Why would an innocent person care if one of the murderers would "roll" and tell the police everything?) Smart was hoping that the court would deem as juveniles the 15-year-olds she sent to kill her husband so that they wouldn't turn on her: "You know, if they get certified as juveniles, then nobody will ever know anything, and they'll all be out in a year, you know, when they turn 18. ..." (What does innocent Pam mean by "ever know anything"?) She then tells Pierce her plan if the kids are certified as adults: Pierce: "He's going to say that you knew about it before it happened, which is the truth." (if J.R. does "roll") Smart: "Right, ... Well, so then I'll have to say, 'No, I didn't' and then they're either gonna believe me or they are gonna believe J.R.-sixteen-years-old-in-the-slammer. And then who (will they believe)? Me, with a professional reputation, and of course that I teach. You know, that's the thing. They are going to believe me." NONE OF THESE QUOTES are even MENTIONED in this "documentary". All this dishonest director does is try to make the viewer think that that the tapes are corrupted and should be IGNORED because of ....let's see...'quality issues' and 'inaudible parts'. Oh, and if you don't buy that because the AUDIBLE parts incriminate Smart so absolutely, then Smart was simply PRETENDING to be involved in the murder, conducting her 'own investigation' into her husband's brutal death. Really? That's the best you can do? Pamela Smart is absolutely guilty and should rot in prison for the rest of her miserable life. Do not get caught up in this film's web of lies wherein Smart is an innocent heroine and the boys she corrupted and doomed are to blame for her imprisonment. That is a concocted fairy tale.

So, I was really looking forward to the release of this documentary because I wanted to look for another perception of the story. I honestly wanted to be convinced that the producers something that would make one reconsider the verdict against her, and unfortunately, I did not. The story was interesting in that it added some critique about some of the movies that were made about this case and also some insight into the investigation. There was nothing there, though, that made a person seriously consider a miscarriage of justice. It may seem unfair that the people that actually committed the murder are being offered a parole date but as the case stands, Greg Smart was not the only victim of this case. The students that Pamela engaged in her scheme were also victims of her. In particularly, Billy Flynn, who was responding and acting within the context of a situation that he never should have been put into in the first place.

This is an oddly structured documentary.The first quarter seems to assume that everybody knows the case and remembers the basic details. It's as if the filmmakers (who apparently spent years on getting this made) forgot who their audience was. Or, they thought it was still the year 2000! Some of the viewers weren't even born when this happened and many many others were too young. Further, this happened almost a quarter century ago, and yet, even the basic facts are barely analyzed in that first section of the movie.Yes, the filmmakers are trying to concoct their own counter-theory that the trial, testimony and public perception were all 'tainted' by the media, but, you need the context in order to test that theory. Fortunately, the rest of the movie does fill in many of the details, but you can't help but criticize the structure of the piece. Of course, an even BIGGER problem is that Pamela Smart (and by implication, the filmmakers who seem stacked in favor of her) seemed to rest their 'hopes' on Raymond Fowler testifying after his release that he would exonerate her. When he doesn't the filmmakers pull out their handy counter-theory and seem to indicate that Fowler can't remember what really happened, instead he is regurgitating what is shown in the TV movie.There are some stylistic flourishes like the clips on old TVs and the whole 'Theater' wraparound. But, these are just standard devices and don't really make the movie any more cinematic (and, if the whole theory is about the populace being influenced by what was shown on TV - why is the wraparound in a THEATER?? Shouldn't it be a gathering around a TV set?) Ironically, the best take on media manipulation in the Smart case remains the movie TO DIE FOR - an almost wholly fictionalized version!

If you liked Errol Morris' "The Thin Blue Line", you'll like Jeremiah Zagof's "Captivated." It's not as neatly organized, nor as convincing, but it's intelligent and it will involve all of your mental faculties that yearn to make judgments.In the early 90s, a pretty young woman named Pamela Smart was convicted of enlisting the help of a couple of fifteen-year-old kids in helping to murder her husband. She was sentenced to life without. The kids plea bargained their way out after confessing that they'd shot the husband. Two of the four are out already, two are eligible next year.It was described by some as another "trial of the century" and turned into a media frenzy. According to this documentary, no one who was awake at all could have escaped the progress of the trial. I must have slept through the 90s but I'm persuaded that the case did get a great deal of media attention. There were two movies made about it. A docudrama called "Murder in New Hampshire," with Helen Hunt as the vamp, and a fictionalized version, "To Die For," with Nicole Kidman, who looks absolutely exquisite and delivers what may be her best performance. But just because we see events through selective captures doesn't necessarily establish the truth value of the events.Pamela Smart has been doing her time in a facility in New York state, where the other inmates brutalized her and the corrections officers raped her and forced her to pose for salacious photos, which they then sold to tabloid newspapers -- or so she and some fellow inmates claim.The simple fact is that practically no one in this film can be trusted to tell the truth, partly because of the media. An example: The judge in the case refused to permit a change of venue, although if ever one were needed it would seem to be here. Why did he refuse? It was a high-profile case and when they wrote the books and made the movies about it, he would be a MOVIE STAR. (He suggested he be played by Gregory Peck.) Everybody involved in the case would be a celebrity, one way or another. The lies and distortions abound. People contradict their earlier statements, deny their own actions, and describe others as different from the people we see in the film. Pamela Smart, now a flinty looking blond in her forties, sees herself as having been demure and puzzled, as well as innocent. But there's a clip of her in the courtroom. The victim's father is speaking his piece after the verdict, sobbing as he reads his notes, and she leaps to her feet and begins shouting viciously back at him.The difference between "Captivated" and "The Thin Blue Line" isn't just in the level of expertise shown in the editing, or the fact that "Blue Line" led eventually to the release of Randall Adams, who had been convicted of murdering a patrolman. "Captivated" is less interested in the details of the murder than in the media blitz surrounding the trial. No celebrity attended Randall Adams when he was railroaded, but the Pamela Smart case had sex in it, and a deviant kind of sex, a 22-year-old pretty woman and a couple of horny but stupid high schoolers. The public evidently salivated over the spectacle. Smart was beautiful, sexy, and popular -- enough in itself to make many other women hate her and envy her. The male spectators probably envied the kids. The main theme is laudable. Not "she's innocent" but "the media contaminates what it examines." Every high-profile case is like carrying out a serious operation before the germ theory was accepted. You know, unwashed bare hands that five minutes earlier were dissecting a corpse? The problem is that the film doesn't have a real narrative trajectory. There are plenty of talking heads -- some of them making sense, others making fools of themselves -- and many of the points hit the target. What normal man WOULDN'T want to be played by Gregory Peck? The director is rather too obviously trying to convince us that Pamela Smart had nothing to do with the murder. I was persuaded that the jury, the witnesses, the talking heads, and the public at large, were made up of ordinary, flawed human beings, and that justice in this case is a matter of probabilities, as it usually is. He'd been better off to applying the Heisenberg principle to the new coverage in the courtroom: You can't poke a camera into an event without having the participants react to the camera. Technically, Zagar borrows a lot from "The Thin Blue Line" but renders it a bit more flashy. Multiple shots of a small tape recorder playing, while we listen to a recorded statement, only this time, instead of one magnetic, static image, the camera slowly circles the indifferent recorder. The minimalist musical score could have been written by my main man, Phillip Glass, described as "doodle doodle doodle".I have to hand it to HBO, though, for undertaking some tough jobs in making these specials. One of the oases of taste and ambition in the Sahara desert that is television.